Even up here, the air smelled and tasted of melting tarry streets. There was a coat of fine grey dust covering the floor and the shelves, as if the city itself were stirring under the stained pavements, smoking and giving off clouds of ash, as threatening as the caldera of an active volcano.

‘Listen,’ I repeated as softly as I could. ‘It’s not a secret. I like your teacher and I think he likes me. I’m sorry you felt excluded. I was afraid that you would be embarrassed and I was trying to find just the right time to talk to you about it.’

‘Embarrassed.’ Jack repeated the word flatly. Then he swung round to stare out of his window at the orange-black sky. ‘Suzy’s pregnant again. She’s had tests. It’s a boy.’

I caught my breath in sympathy. This was very hard. Tony’s other family and therefore his competing love for people who were nothing much to do with Jack was all too obtrusive. My son had taken the birth of the twins hard enough, those dear little scarlet-faced babies with their tiny clenched fists and black eyelashes, but at least he had been able to tell himself that they were only girls. He was Tony’s son.

Now there was fresh unwelcome proof that Tony and Suzy had sex with each other and as a direct result he wouldn’t be the best-loved boy any longer. There would be a younger and probably more satisfactory claimant.

On top of this, tonight, there was the possibility that his mother and his teacher were also thinking about having sex. Might even, for all Jack knew, already actually be having unrestrained and completely inappropriate sex, all over the place, in the same world that he had to live in.

Even his sister never stopped talking about her miraculous new boyfriend and all his virtues.

Embarrassing barely described it. Everyone Jack knew was about to have even less time to devote to him. He was a lonely misfit at school and he needed reassurance and security at home, so life deftly handed him the opposite.

‘How do you know? Are you sure?’ I was grasping at straws, but maybe there had been a mistake.

‘Dad rang. He wanted me and Lola to know first. You know.’ Jack made an angry face. I did know. Tony always tried to do the right thing in these matters, whatever was considerate, even to me as well as to his older children. Sometimes they appreciated his concern, at others it was too much. They needed accessible reasons to be angry with him from time to time, just as they were often angry with me, and Tony made it more difficult for them to find any.

‘Yes. So where’s Lo now?’

Jack did the shrug. ‘Told you. In her room.’